


Collateral Damage

by MMXIII



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gunshot Wounds, Hospital, Hospitalization, M/M, Murder Husbands, Psychopaths In Love, Recovery, Serious Injuries, Whump, criminal boyfriends, knee capping, mormor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-01
Updated: 2014-06-01
Packaged: 2018-02-03 01:59:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1726976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MMXIII/pseuds/MMXIII
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Ostensibly, there is no silence here. Between the soft mechanical clicks of respiratory apparatus and the thrum of corridor activity.</p><p>The sweaty hair stuck to the thin parts of Sebastian’s skull, the planes that flank the eye sockets, is too long. This is an irrelevant observation.'</p><p>In which Sebastian is seriously injured, and Jim is...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Collateral Damage

**Author's Note:**

> Another Sebastian whump I'm afraid, not that there's anything remotely enjoyable about bringing powerful men to their metaphorical knees... [no pun intended!]
> 
> Also, I apologize for the medical stuff & confess to a great deal of ignorance on the subject...
> 
> Thanks :)

Ostensibly, there is no silence here. Between the soft mechanical clicks of respiratory apparatus and the thrum of corridor activity. The whir of the ventilation system and the distant arrhythmia of the street outside. But even as something akin to a breeze disturbs the inevitably off-white plastic blinds drawn over the window causing them to click together like hollow bones, the _quiet_ is profound.

You note there is no darkness either; the would-be blackness is stained by constellations of minute static lights. You’ve been passing the time finding _Ursula Minor, Cerberus, Gemini_ …

Your gaze alights upon the bed again. The sweaty hair stuck to the thin parts of Sebastian’s skull, the planes that flank the eye sockets, is too long. This is an irrelevant observation.

 

There is a low rustling as he drags his left arm up, resting the downturned wrist bone in the blue-black hollows of his eyes. The junction between his soft inner-forearm and the plastic catheter looks raw, uncomfortable. It strikes you that you don’t like it. That you want to pull it **out** with your _teeth_.

The other arm is wrapped in squares of gauze, and lies limply across his stomach. Three fingers are taped together; you can _taste_ his frustration in the air.

His half-fractured jaw is darkened by brown bruises festering under days of stubble and an unbearably bleak expression; his ruined knee is wrapped and bound stiffly on the bed in front of him.

He looks older. Fatigued. _Abused._

You lean back silently in the chair.

‘How was surgery?’

He doesn’t respond. But you knew _he knew_ you were there. Silence is _eloquent_.

You find yourself thinking about additional operations, vascular damage, physiotherapy, silver sword sticks, largely inconsolable _rage_.

Sebastian breathes in slowly, as if it’s he’s drawing the last lung-full of smoke from a dying cigarette.

‘Why are you here?’ he murmurs, barely audible over the ambient thrum of hospital machinery.

You stare at him for a long time in the half-light, his angular profile bathed in an insipid neon phosphorescence. You don’t know. You don’t _know_. _You_ don’t know.

 _Not really_.

Your phone beeps twice in your jacket pocket.

He lowers his arm gently but doesn’t turn his head, staring resolutely at the join between the opposite wall and the polystyrene-tiled ceiling. His fingers brush the aluminium bedrail listlessly, the cheap sheets crackling under his palm. You wrinkle your nose at the sound; maybe he smiles faintly, just with the farthest side of his mouth.

 

_You think of him thrashing on the ground, on concrete black and tacky with his own blood. Flat on his back and snarling, teeth bared, eyes blown, pulse jacked, high out of his mind on adrenaline._

_And then. Screaming at the splintering of bone, cartilage, muscle fibre._

_And then lying limply, right leg twisted off to the side, mouth slack, eyes unseeing, pulped joint inevitably drawing your eye. You remember the little white flicks, shards of bone held in the strings of cooling blood stiffening his jeans._

 

‘You almost died’ you say. This is factual. There was blood _everywhere_. You were going to skin them all like _dogs_. And he _still_ won’t look at you; e _verybody_ looks at you, you’re fucking _threatening_. You suppose Sebastian has never been _afraid_ per se.

‘That’s what people _do_ , Jim’.

 

For a moment you burn with incandescent rage. You _loathe_ the insignificant teeming thousands that crawl over the face of the earth. Antipathetic. _Inconsequential_. But Sebastian blazes **_in tenebris_** , and in this _distinct_ moment, you might just loathe his recklessness more.

Your phone begins to buzz. You turn it off with one hand, not bothering to look at the screen.

‘I don’t pay you to get shot, Sebastian’, you say it slowly, carefully.

He snorts, an impatient, dismissive sound. His fingers twitch by his thigh, unable to curl inwards due to his severely lacerated wrist. After days of being tied down he’s itching for confrontation. You can see the _fight_ in his shoulders.

He’s also too weak to engage. Perhaps that’s why he elects to back down.

After a moment, he makes to turn over onto his side, away from you. His shoulder barely pulls away from the mattress before he’s forced to abort with an enraged sob.

 _Finally_ , he looks at his knee uncovered by the fleece blanket.

‘Sebastian-’

‘SHUT UP’ he snarls, ‘Shut. Up.’

The water in the translucent plastic cup on the small table pressed up against the bed trembles almost imperceptibly. Earlier you had noticed tiny shards of glass under the bed.

He breathes heavily into the pillow, head turned to the side as sharply as possible, as far away from you as possible as he can get without rotating his body. He’s pressing low gasping noises into the cheap cotton blend.

This is _entirely_ unnecessary.

 

You slide smoothly from the chair to stand alongside the bed.

‘Fuck off, James’ he chokes, breathing thick and laboured. He’s exhausted. Chronic fatigue sits in his eyes and licks the hollow between his collar bones. You can hear him actively willing you to leave.

And you see now exactly what Sebastian is made of. The first and only principle in his life is uncompromising self-reliance; his patella is completely shattered, femur chipped, tibia fractured. You know _he knows_ he may never be able to run again.

_Crash headlong down iron fire escapes._

_Crouch for hours in silence before the crosshairs._

Time for a contingency plan, you think. Time for an _alteration_ of career.

 

You slide the fingers of your left hand through his sticky blonde hair until it lies against the apex of his skull, grit catching under your fingernails. He lets you drag you fingers back and forth across his scalp. Possessive. _Soothing_. You bend down slightly and press your nose into the surprisingly soft expanse under his jaw, pleasingly damp and _feral_ -smelling. When you pull away to press your tongue against his abraded cheek bone he has closed his eyes.

‘Eight to twelve weeks’, you murmur

He makes a slow, quiet sound of affirmation; you watch the vague movements of his throat like a man possessed.

‘And then?, _more of a sound than a question_.

You press your teeth to the blade of his jaw.

‘And then’, you say into the side of his lovely head, ‘I want you. With me’

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Just thought it was worth adding that the Moran family motto is 'Lucent in Tenebris' - They shine in darkness


End file.
